The Deep End of the Ocean

The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacqueline Mitchard is a 1996 Penguin publication.

Absorbing family drama…

Three-year-old Ben goes missing when his mother travels to Chicago for a class reunion. The fallout is placed under an intense microscope as a family is torn apart by the loss of their child…

It’s funny what minutiae is stored in my brain sometimes. Years ago, I was looking through the clearance table at my local paperback swap store, when I happened across this book. It triggered a memory in my mind of a colleague telling me they had stayed up late one night watching a movie called ‘The Deep End of the Ocean’ which starred Michelle Pfeiffer. They described it as ‘absorbing’.

So, I decided I would see what the book was show more like, especially after reading the synopsis.

Unfortunately, the book has been sitting on my shelf all these years, and every time I considered reading it, I changed my mind. Now, as many of you have heard me explain, recently, I’m culling through my massive TBR pile and making some tough choices.

Any book that has been on the list longer than five years is automatically on the chopping block- so I had to decide. Read it right now… or box it up and donate it to the library…

So here we are…

The story starts off like any other book centered around a missing child. Beth is attending her class reunion and decided to take her children along. Her three-year-old son vanishes in a crowded hotel lobby, never to be seen or heard from again.

While normally this trope crops up in crime fiction this book does not even remotely fall into that category, in my opinion.

This a heavy drama that explores the aftermath of losing a child and the effect it has on a family, a marriage, and the remaining children, examining the coping mechanisms each resort to in order to get by.

The damage is horrifying and profound. It’s easy to judge, to take sides, the feel sympathy and empathy, anger, and frustration- sometimes all at once. Each character is flawed, or damaged and they go through years of emotional trauma before a miraculous turn of events opens an entirely new avenue of bittersweet hope and pain.

The novel was published in the mid/late nineties, and it shows in many ways. Some outdated attitudes and stereotypes must be tolerated- some of which are offensive at times. But the main thing to keep in mind is that this is not a missing persons investigation- it is a family drama-and as a result, the pacing at times moved at a snail’s pace. I read two or three chapters a night, then changed over to another book never struggling to put the book down, until somewhere around the half-way mark when I found myself becoming much more invested- until finally, one night I picked it up and literally could not tear my eyes off the pages.

It took a while to get there, but once all the chips were on the table it was riveting.

Now, this scenario has been explored, even before this book was written, and countless times since, but the internal turmoil the story explored is especially profound and emotional, but also frightening, and very, very sad. The characters were not always likeable- in fact, often I wanted to scream at all of them!! Still, the situation demands that judgment be withheld and so I watched from a distance as events unfolded and felt all the emotions the characters did, but from a more analytical perch. It was hard, depressing, in many ways, but also very thought provoking.

The saga does continue with a follow-up book, and I was pleased to discover the author delves deeper into this family drama, though I do hope it is not quite as bleak as this wrenching story.

Overall, I am glad I didn’t box this book up just yet. It will still find its way to a new home, where I hope another reader will someday find themselves entrenched in this realistic, heart-rending story, and that it will stay them, as it will certainly stay with me.

4 stars show less

I saw the movie, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, years ago and always had in the back of my mind that I'd like to read the book. I'm glad I did. Jacquelyn Mitchard did a masterful job writing this book. The characters are rich, complex and fully developed. The plot has plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing. And not everything gets explained or tied up in a neat bow - much like life.

The first two sections of the story are told from a single point of view and the rest of the book alternates between Beth's (the mother) and her son Vincent's point of view. That in itself was clever and made the story feel more complete and complex.

The characters aren't likeable all the time - just like real people. But I found myself wanting them to show more find healing and to connect with one another in a healthy way. I felt sad when that didn't happen and relieved when it did.

I recommend this to anyone who wants a story that is challenging and thought provoking. I don't think of it as a beach read - kind of mindlessly entertaining. It engaged much more of my brain and emotions. show less

SPOILER ALERT—this review discusses the plot beyond what some people who haven’t read the book may want to know.

There are lots of reviews of this book out here on the web so perhaps it doesn’t really need one more. But reading several made me want to tap those reviewers of the shoulders and point out they were looking at the author’s right hand when the really interesting part of this books was in her left. Reviewers focus on the familiar Act One of the story—the missing child, the mother paralyzed with grief neglecting the rest of her family, the brave father trying to hold everything together and keep life going for his other kids, the large cast of supporting characters. These elements are all very well rendered—sometimes show more heartbreakingly so (think The Lovely Bones).

And when, years later, the missing child accidently turns up on his family’s doorstep, not aware that he was ever missing, I wondered how the writer could need another couple hundred pages to wrap this thing up. It’s at that point that many of the online reviewers lost interest; many state that they skimmed or had to force themselves to read the rest of the book. But Deep End of the Ocean is not the formula family-crisis tragedy these reviewers seem to crave.

The author performs such graceful slight-of-hand that everybody focuses on the separation while the real heart and soul of this book is the reunion. Sure, to have a reunion, first you have to have a separation. But, the loss in Deep End of the Ocean—as crushingly sad as it is—is preamble. The hard questions at the heart of the book are about reunion. Can reunion be more than superficial and what are the costs? show less

Fairly complex story about a lost child. Beth's three-year-old son Ben disappears as she tries to straighten out a reservation at a reunion. His disappearance affects everyone in the family, perhaps most strongly his brother Vincent. While Beth does not give up hope of finding Ben, her focus on him may be a big part of the reason the marriage doesn't last and Vincent acts out.

So we get into the lives of more than one family member, tracing their lives through the years, until something astounding happens. It is the aftermath of that something that I found most interesting and perhaps most real.

I have read this novel 3 times. The first time was very emotional. I felt gut punched and raw. The second time, I knew how it ended, but I still felt like my heart was raw at the end. The 3rd and now the last time, I felt the sadness of the book and perhaps the depth of loss of parents that have lost a child. Warning, there is no lightness to this story. It will stay in your head and heart long after you have read it.

Heart-wrenching drama...not good for parent of small child...it's too real. But if you can step away from the drama, the process that each character goes through is compelling.

When Beth Cappadora takes her three children to Chicago for her school reunion, every parent’s worst nightmare comes true as middle child – three year old Ben – goes missing. For nine years Beth and her husband Pat live in limbo, never knowing what happened to their son, or if he is still alive somewhere. Their older son Vincent is in severe danger of going off the rails completely. And then one day, a youngster knocks on her door and Beth is convinced that this is the missing Ben (no spoilers here; this is in the blurb on the back).

I remember watching the film that was based on this book many years ago. It stuck with me a lot, and I wanted to read the book for ages. Unfortunately I would have to say that this is a rare case of show more the film being better than the book. The premise itself was so interesting if also somewhat morbid; how does a family carry on when a child is missing? It’s not a spoiler to say that in the second half of the book the family and the reader does get to find out what happened, and the focus shifts from the mystery of what happened to Ben, to how everyone deals with the fallout.

The problem for me was not in the storyline itself; it was the fact that it just seemed to go on and on and on, and there was so much in there that didn’t really seem to add anything – some heavy editing could have made such a difference.

I never really warmed to Beth, but it’s worth bearing in mind that we never really know her prior to her son disappearing, and that event affects her so much that she becomes remote and detached from her whole family – so what is an understandable reaction is actually what makes her difficult to like. Pat was marginally more likeable, but my favourite character was Vincent. After the initial story of the disappearance which is told in the third person, but largely from Beth’s point of view, Vincent himself is the focus of other chapters, and we see how Ben’s disappearance and the consequent family dynamic has affected him.

If you like family drama and drawn out storylines, maybe give this one a whirl. I’ll be honest and say that the last 150 or so pages did drag a bit for me and I was glad to finally finish, but even so, the storyline itself was enough to make me consider reading something else by this author. show less